To Build a Mountain and Raise a People: Making and Inhabiting an Inka God’s House (Wanakawre, Cuzco, Peru)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past three decades, anthropological archaeologists have engaged in a vibrant interdisciplinary conversation about the production of space. Rejecting earlier viewpoints that saw social space as the passive product of cultural worldview or political strategy, archaeologists developed innovative approaches to document how space actively shapes and is shaped by human activity, a dialectic often called “spatial practice.” Jerry Moore, in particular, has advanced a viewpoint that moves beyond the binaries of this dialectic to ground our understanding of social space in the materiality of the physical environment. Moore’s work on the most common of built forms—the dwelling—defines space as a never-ending material process. His research centers on the materials that shape social life: the logs that manifest cultural concepts of permanency and home; the adobe bricks that are the stuff of expert knowledge and skill; the cane that is essential to the reverberation of sound and the circulation of ideas within village communities. In this paper, I celebrate Moore’s contributions by applying his analytical and methodological lenses to the mountain temple of Wanakawre (Cuzco, Peru), arguing that Inka ideas of “home” were in part manifested through practices of gathering, sustaining, and recycling the materials of a deity’s house.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36105.0